CHAPTER 8

These Drafts and Castoffs

Mapping Literary Manuscripts

Outside Madrid’s Reine Sophia Museum, night’s pregnant belly spilling over the city’s belted horizon, I too was heavy with arrival. Picasso’s Guernica had delivered me from paella and red wine. Spanish teenagers cascading off a bus soon engulfed me. In unison they lifted the black hoods of their Oakland Raiders hoodies, a cross-cultural sign of street cred and disaffection. I rolled up my collar. Inside Reine Sophia’s blend of contemporary glass and the old stone of Madrid’s first hospital, all the birth- and death-beds had given way to the province of modern art. “Second floor, room 6,” I mumbled, locating Picasso’s great work in space if not time. Then, sudden compadres, we stood before the painting, iron filings drawn by its shadowy magnet. Arm by lifted arm, the boys dropped their hoods, leaves unleafing from the windswept branch, their hair black as tree trunk, mine as gray as week-old snow. Ruffled quiet of shuffled feet. A sigh. The lights’ theatrical hum. In the presence of art, only the painting spoke.

Twenty minutes, an hour, who knows? By chance I wandered through a doorway into an adjacent room. There, behind glass, lay Picasso’s rough penciled studies for Guernica. Smallish against the painting’s eventual sprawl, the sequential studies held hands—their line a bloodline. Sketchbook size, his pencil’s graphite gray against gray paper, they seemed at first glance so unimpressive I wondered who thought to save these, mere drafts and cast-offs. The first was hardly more than squiggled shapes, something tornadic rising up from chaos left center. In the next that tornado became a raised fist, gesture of defiance to Franco’s fascism. Later, came Spain’s national symbol, a great bull looking first in my eyes and then away. Gradually, village buildings half in rubble, a roof akilter and giving way. Now here, where the fist once fisted, one wide-eyed horse swallowed a dropped bomb, its rider dead upon the ground. Then the fist was gone, and the dove of peace, wings flown from right to left center, now hovered nearly painted over amid the drear. Finally, the Basque mother cradling a dead child, akimbo and limp in her frail arms. Innocents, welcome to twentieth-century warfare, whose victims were as likely civilians as soldiers.

The painting astonished me even more once I witnessed the process and dross of its making. Where Picasso had traveled, how he wandered, got lost, and eventually turned up at Guernica now loomed as beautiful as the ultimate emergence of his painting.

It’s said great artists transport the viewer, reader, and listener. Picasso had sent me reeling, vertiginous and ecstatic. Standing among his painting’s studies, I sensed kinship of process and product. I remembered as a graduate student thumbing James Wright’s Amenities of Stone, the suppressed 1961 poetry manuscript Wright withdrew from publication. There, in Wright’s draft revisions, elisions, and diaristic commentary, I had first caught sight of the personal, cultural, and aesthetic vortex of artistic creation. There, Wright had dismissed the manuscript’s aesthetic schizophrenia, its mixing of “old” and “new” poetic modes. With Wright’s failed book in hand, clutching a dead man’s work, I had wondered then who thought to save these drafts and castoffs.

 

Art lovers are hedonists of the first order, beautifully selfish with their eyes and ears. In a world where varieties of ugliness circle like vultures hungry for one’s attention, who is to be blamed for taking beauty as its own reward? Many who appreciate art’s capability for aesthetic transport naturally care less about the journey than its destination. For the nonspecialist—which is to say for most of America—that the poem, song, or painting conveys beauty is sufficient unto itself. In short, it’s not process but result that captures one’s attention. Surely this is true for one’s own route to pleasure— how one got there looms less critical than the matter of one’s having arrived in the first place.

It’s a shame if this lack of curiosity suffices also for one’s attitude to the artist’s journey, the thorny creative path an artist seldom trollops happily from A to Z. Both Wright’s manuscripts and Picasso’s studies map the topography of imagination. They plot a terrain where one powerful tectonic force slams against another, shaping the artistic landscape in volatile and unpredictable ways. They reveal artists tugged this way by human emotion, hauled that way by artistic invention, discovery, and surprise. A penciled GPS of the artists’ turns, backups, and swerves, their manuscripts and studies compose an ex post facto map for a trip that cannot be repeated. Through their chronicling of both artists’ journeys, these studies and drafts transported me to understanding unattainable without them.

Rather than diminishing the artist’s achievement, the act of pondering the artist’s fumble in the dark screwups, silly missteps, and blockheaded wrong turns actually accentuates our appreciation of the creative process. This notion ought not to be inhospitable for a culture such as ours, one enamored with beauty wrought from lumpy clay. Evidence the current spate of televised home makeovers and plastic-surgery before and afters. Why not a much-watched Swan for poems and paintings?

For poets the matter is especially keen. Their brave sallies and tail-between-the-legs retreats follow them in a wagon train of musty cardboard boxes. This paper trail means their desert wanderings and failed ascents record a history of not-quite-rightness with a perpetuity unavailable in many art forms. (The painter, for instance, simply paints over her misshapen forms or gauche colors.) For the past three centuries poets have both generated and maintained a vast quantity of paper drafts, a hulking body of work that floats unseen beneath the publishable tip of the iceberg. What’s more, recent poets have enjoyed a veritable panoply of means to create these hard and digital drafts. And libraries have taken notice, securing huge caches of poets’ manuscripts in burgeoning special collections.¹ Given this welter of paper and computer drafts, one would do well to contemplate the contemporary phenomenon of poetry manuscripts, especially what those worksheets may reveal of writers and thus what they may in turn reveal to scholars. To do so, let’s examine several representative James Wright worksheets for what they disclose of the poem’s and the poet’s journeys into being.

Amid the Collected Cardboard Boxes

There’s ore in poets’ collected cardboard boxes, gold as weighty as the duct-taped, seam-split boxes themselves. Manuscripts interest us for several reasons. First, they reveal poets’ creative topography, the terrain of their aesthetic struggles and the paths they take along the way to making a poem, a book, an oeuvre. Manuscripts also display the collision between poets’ individual aesthetics and the era’s literary history, that is, the interplay of personal vision and larger communal pressures. They unmask poets’ literary influences in the process—in effect, letting readers in on which writers living or dead had (or have) the poet’s ear. In addition, manuscripts show writers messily and vulnerably at work behind closed doors, providing a portal to the plagues of uncertainty and audacity that beset them.

Of the many insights provided by manuscript materials, the most compelling is the view proffered of poets’ (re)defining their art. Drafts of familiar works exhibit the poets’ tinkering well-loved, familiar poems into being in ways readers never imagined. And they may also open up new work unseen by readers’ eyes, offering readers a breathtakingly fresh horizon tinged with the palette of the voyeur’s rainbow. These materials come in the form of “fair” copies unsullied by the writer’s revisions and “foul” copies bearing the poet’s cross-outs, arrows, and occasional editorial remarks. These drafts may well constitute a previously unknown map of what a writer was up to, why, and how—something especially true of James Wright’s manuscripts.

In the months following the 1959 publication of Saint Judas, Wright should have been waltzing on literary air. His first book The Green Wall (1957), had been awarded the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets Award by the venerable W. H. Auden, and his second had garnered critical praise. In a relatively short period, his poems had appeared in many of the nation’s best literary magazines, he had secured a teaching position at a major university, and he was being hailed as the American Keats for his line’s deft musical touch. What young poet might find fault with this? Wright surely did, as his manuscripts and worksheets make abundantly obvious. They bare a poet in the throes of remaking himself.

Audacity of Artistic Redefinition

Wright’s manuscripts and worksheets show he had begun to tire of the odd sort of ventriloquist act he had been performing, speaking his poems in the blended voices of Donne, Frost, E. A. Robinson, and other poet forebears. He had begun to doubt the rigid exigencies of the rational mind and prescribed form, suddenly imprisoned within the very classical modes whose castle he had labored mightily to build and to inhabit. The undergraduate years studying Latin at Kenyon College had not washed the coal dust off the working-class kid from Martins Ferry, and the Ph.D. had not thoroughly cleansed the cracked diction of his “Ohioan”—a voice his poems to this point had admitted only in brief syntactic lashes. What’s more, Wright’s reading of foreign poets such as Georg Trakl, Lorca, Neruda, Vallejo, and others introduced poetry that privileged intuition over reason and that refused human separation from natural forces. To top it off, Wright had fallen blindsided victim to the “anthology wars” pitting traditional against more experimental aesthetics. For instance, poet James Dickey, reviewing the fairly conservative anthology New Poets of England and America (1957), had relegated Wright to dubious membership in the poetic “School of Charm.” Not to be outdone, Richard Foster had needled Wright for his anthologized poems’ “pompous and heavy poetic mannerisms.”²

Wright saw himself trapped between two equally unappealing poles— the wild chanting of the Beat poets and the polite versifying of the academics. He wished fervently to avoid association with either group, as this unpublished ditty makes toothily clear: “The beat and slick / Are boring, yapping fleas. / They make me sick.”³ Stung emotionally and beset with artistic doubt, Wright decided to risk it all. Instead of resting on his proverbial laurels, Wright reexamined the modes and values that had brought him recognition. In short, he resolved to seek a redefinition of the poetic self. That redefinition required the poet to interrogate his dearest assumptions about what a poem is and might be and, even more fundamentally, to interrogate also his notion of what a poet is and might become.

Between 1959 and the 1963 publication of his groundbreaking The Branch Will Not Break, Wright tinkered with not only Amenities of Stone but also five other potential manuscripts. All in all, Wright auditioned 113 different poems for a role in his next collection, slowly rewriting, reimagining, or simply rejecting those that did not suit his emerging aesthetic. At one point Wright appears to have thought his remaking of poet and poem was complete, submitting Amenities as a March 5, 1961, manuscript of 67 poems to Wesleyan University Press for publication and release in January 1962. But the black dog of aesthetic doubt would not release its grip on Wright’s leg. He alerted Donald Hall, his Wesleyan editor, and withdrew the book from publication.

Wright’s arrangement of Amenities’ poems demonstrates awareness of his own—and the era’s—evolving aesthetics. Letting loose a roundhouse punch and ducking his head at the same time, Wright thought to quote Whitman on the book’s August 10, 1961, frontispiece: “I note Whitman on the defense of the past: ‘If he does not provide new forms, he is not what is wanted.’” Wright hoped to fashion his new manuscript truly new. Still, as we shall see, that pledge proved hard to follow for numerous reasons. Of the book’s three sections, the first is titled “Academic Poems.” Not surprisingly, given its self-conscious title, this section contains fourteen rhymed and metrically regular poems (including two sonnets). As its name implies, “Explorations” gathers forty-eight poems exhibiting a fresh mode open to lat diction, Deep Image invention, and immersion in the natural. Of these forty-eight poems, twenty later appeared in Branch. The poems of the third section, “Fictitious Voices,” are just that—voices Wright was trying on for size—and none survives within his subsequent book’s pages.

Wright envisioned an even more overt means of bidding his solemn goodbye to academic verse. On the flyleaf of Amenities, the book’s flagpole, if you will, Wright was to print the poem “His Farewell to Old Poetry,” just in case the dense reader missed Wright’s flying different colors. On a 1961 draft of the poem, Wright, intoxicated with his radical conversion, even contemplated printing the poem “in prose.” Elegiac, the poem begins by invoking the memory of Philip Timberlake, Wright’s former teacher at Kenyon, who first taught him “the Muse survived in trees,” an oddly sylvan notion of classical literary tradition. It’s the poem’s second section, however, that lays down the score, invoking for the initial time the recurrent image of Wright’s muse “Jenny”:

 

Jenny, Sir Walter Ralegh and John Donne

Brood in the trees, but they say nothing now.

They sang delicate melodies to your voice

When I was young, but now Igrant them rest.

......................................................................

                                                       I lose

All the old echoes... .⁴

Wright had apprenticed to the poets of English, classicist tradition, a mode that had brought him quick renown. However, for the newly evolving Wright of 1961, those poets and that tradition “say nothing now.” In the poem’s third section, one can detect vitriol in Wright’s declaration of independence and identify, too, a sadness bending on gloom:

 

Now my amenities of stone are done,

God damn me if I care whether or not

Anyone hears my voice, you will not.

We came so early, we thought to stay so long.

But it is already midnight, and we are gone.

I know your face the lovelist face I know.

Now I know nothing, and I die alone.

As this material makes apparent, Wright’s redefinition of the poetic self was not to be easily occasioned. It demanded artistic and intellectual courage surely, but it also called for a full measure of emotional strength. Claiming to be done with the “old poetry” is one thing, but actually killing off the old and identifying exactly what’s “new” is something altogether different.

Throughout his career Wright enjoyed tweaking the upturned noses of the competing cliques seeking to delimit the aesthetic boundaries of his poems. In fact, until his early death at age fifty-two, Wright continued to compose poems in both free and fixed forms. For Wright, the solution to his artistic troubles (and potentialities) went beyond simply rejecting rhyme and determinate meter. In what turned out to be his posthumous collection, This Journey, Wright had plotted one last shot at these factions, giving them a dying man’s punch in their collective guts. If carefully scanned, “May Morning,” one ostensible prose poem printed there, turns out instead to be a Petrarchan sonnet with a decidedly tight rhyme scheme. How Wright must have savored the chance to illustrate that good writing transcends arguments about mere form, frustrating at once the noisy proponents of both polar modes.⁵

But back in 1962 Wright was still trying to recognize the face of what to him was the new poetry. It seemed Protean, an aesthetic shape-changer. On a May 21 draft of “Holding a Pearl in My Hands, April 1962,” Wright noted how the poem “hidden” within the draft “needs to be weeded free.” That he had begun to delete lines and individual poems from his working manuscript seemed to Wright to be “the clearest sign so far” that he was “learning what the new poetry is” and also that he had “obtained at least enough emotional strength to feel reassured about deletions.” Sometimes that strength wavered, as manuscript drafts confirm. In that case, the poet fell back on the protectiveness of what I call the aesthetic rope-a-dope.

Aesthetic Rope-a-Dope

Among Wright’s work, “A Blessing” has received nearly universal critical acclaim and captured innumerable anthologies’ attention, including that of the hallowed Norton Anthology of American Literature. Norman Friedman goes so far as to say that “for sweetness, for joy, for precision, for rhythm, for eroticism, for structure, for surprise—for all of these things, this poem is nearly perfect.”⁶ Chapter 2 has already addressed the poem’s central epiphanic incident. The speaker’s and his friend’s communing with Indian ponies invokes considerable ecstatic reverie—just the sort of thing for which a man might be subjected to much badgering by his buddies or by tough-minded critics. Here’s a reminder of the crucial lines:

 

I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,

For she has walked over to me

And nuzzled my left hand.

........................................

And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear

That is delicate as the skin above a girl’s wrist.

Suddenly I realize

That if I stepped out of my body I would break

Into blossom.

Here’s what interests me. Even faced with what many regard as a poem “nearly perfect,” Wright felt the aesthetic and emotional risks of publishing such an overtly Romantic poem in an era proudly draped in mordant skepticism. After the poem’s acceptance by Poetry, Wright defensively revised the poem, replacing the “blessing” of its title, striking the speaker’s touching of the horse’s ear (and thus the merging of human and natural sensibilities), and recasting the final epiphany as the equivocating “Suddenly I think.”

Though Wright may indeed have been “learning” what the new poetry was, his drafts reveal he’s not yet resolute enough to stay the course. Instead, he engages in an aesthetic rope-a-dope reminiscent of Muhammad Ali, who’d slump against the ropes while covering his head and torso with his arms. While his opponent swung wildly, Ali would remain safe behind his raised arms’ protective wall. So, perhaps, would Wright, if he excised these lines from his poem. He’d not be wounded by conservative critics ready to count out the glass-jawed Romantic, those who’d rebuke him for his jejune communing with a horse. Wright had already covered up, removing the lines that left him most exposed.

To be sure, Wright’s emerging aesthetic had much to do with vulnerability, a disposition of unguardedness that opened him to the possibility of ecstatic experience. To reject that possibility was to leave Wright mired in the old mode he was fervently seeking to adapt, evolve, or reject. An unpublished poem from Amenities illuminates how Wright risked vulnerability of a different fashion, hazarding his being labeled not only a hop-headed Romantic softie but also a political agent provocateur. “The Continental Can Company at Six O’clock” strikes a bold political stance by imagistically conflating the polluted Ohio River and the area’s exploited workers, implying their mutual victimization at the hands of the wealthy and powerful. When the speaker observes workers driving away from a day’s labor, he witnesses a pernicious transformation:

 

The faces fall down the ramp into the yard

Beside the river.

Headlights roil over the water,

And the faces divide into drops of blood,

That fall over the high voltage wires of the fence

Into the river.

The water darkens to red fire.

And the blast furnaces of Benwood are lunging at the sky,

Animals blinded with anger.

Suddenly the faces flood into one dark red face.

The hood of each car is a dark sloop bearing a coffin

Toward the river.

This is October, the restless flames of dead blow torches

Have scarred the wind.

Men are dying without ever knowing it.

America, America,

It is raining

In the river.⁷

No doubt Wright understood the conservative social climate of the early sixties, a buttoned-down scene yet to fracture beneath rock-tossing rebellions forged by the Civil Rights, antiwar, and youth movements. No doubt he recognized how the era’s conservative poetic establishment would respond to the “high voltage” of his calling-out America by name, shaking the country’s citizens by their limp shoulders, and imploring them to wake up to the sorry fate of workers chewed up and spit out by America’s industrial base. In Wright’s poem, the workplace itself is bestial, its workers bloodied by their day’s labor. Worse yet, Wright’s poem negates even the stereotypical escape of the workday’s end, its promise of a cold beer and a warm supper. Instead, these workers head out the factory door to take the wheels of cars-become-boats-become-coffins, fated zombies unaware of their shared death-in-life. This striking image fashions a powerful statement about American industrialization and economic class, so one wonders why Wright never published the piece in journal or book form. Perhaps Wright may have mistakenly believed his volatile poem was simply not good enough. Just as likely, Wright judged the electrical charge from this poem was too hot to handle—another expression of Wright’s plying the Aesthetic Rope-a-Dope.

The Nehru Jacket and a Tweed Sport Coat

What’s notable here is how Wright’s poems rejecting “academic” verse have now become emblematic of the very mode he sought to escape. For instance, critic Hank Lazer points to Wright’s 1963 “image-oriented transformation” as displaying “his revulsion at abstract critical thinking” and the sort of imagistic “decorativeness” that also dominated the moment’s work of W. S. Merwin, Galway Kinnell, Bly, and numerous others. It’s true Wright’s work and that of his fellows was frequently pictorial, favoring personal epiphany and intuition over the prior New Critical era’s penchant for rational modes of irony, tension, and paradox. In short, this was their works’ aesthetic context. Like the era’s fleeting affection for the Nehru jacket, the “Deep Image” and its counterparts became all the rage, an aesthetic fashion statement. The image poem’s visual surface was meant to be strikingly fresh, for its outward presentation reflected an equally innovative inward reliance on intuitively connected images to convey states of awareness. In fact, the rhythm of such a poem was the rhythm of its images, suggested Robert Kelly in the little magazine Trobar.⁸ As with fascination with the Nehru, the image poem signaled a countercultural quest for mystical manners of being and seeing. Both the Nehru and the Deep Image offered an exterior sign of an interior state that stood in marked contrast to the then-dominant social and aesthetic order.

Deep Image poetry enacted its own mutiny against the status quo of academic verse. And Wright’s version of this mode was strikingly political in tone and content, not unlike many of the more adventuresome poetries at play in our current moment. Still, to contemporary eyes the image poem may appear as quaint as the oddly collared Nehru. But only aesthetic myopia would see it as the establishment’s tweed sport coat. Surprisingly, that is just what has happened. Today, this former poetry of rebellion is derisively dubbed “academic” or “workshop.” For many such as Lazer, a generally intelligent critic, it has become an aesthetic expression of The Man, a mode complicit with realms of conservative power rejected by recent Language, feminist, slam, and performance poets outside the mainstream.⁹ Ironically, Wright’s aesthetic uprising has now been consigned to membership in the very dominant mode he refused to abide by. What’s more, the terms of his rebellion—and his artistic choices—remain as febrile as they were nearly fifty years ago. Invoking the protectiveness of the aesthetic rope-a-dope would have done little to save him, then or now.

Rhetoric, Revision, and the Fumbled Line

Manuscript drafts also make known the keen attention poets must lend to individual lines. We readers love to see the poet fumble a bit on the way to a fluid line because we see in that small foundering our own struggles to say it right. There’s an odd sort of satisfaction in knowing that what for the poet in the end appears so graceful (and thus seems to have come so effortlessly) in truth demanded casting and recasting. It’s akin to sneaking a peek at Michael Jordan’s lifting weights, running laps, sweating his way through dribbling drills, and practicing his daily three hundred three-pointers. Later, when he glides down the lane to hit the game winner, the triumph seems more earned than merely bestowed.

Wright’s “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota” is a case in point when it comes to the poet’s occasionally fumbling a single, crucial line. Variously revered or reviled for the way its quick flurry of nature images resolves in startling confession, “Lying in a Hammock” emanates technical confidence and élan. It’s the type of poem one simply can’t imagine the poet having second thoughts about, especially its revelatory closing line. The head-spinning closer erupts volcanically, as if from the deepest realm of the poet’s psyche. Tell me, though, how would one respond to the final line’s lightning if it did not flare but merely blinked, as we have seen earlier in this version Wright first cast and then selectively crossed out:

 

I seem to have wasted my whole life.¹⁰

Wright was also working against his own technical competency as a formal poet, skill acquired by much study and attention to metrics, rhyme, and florid diction. Here’s the opening lines of “The Mating of Dreams,” an unpublished poem Wright tinkered with on “Aug. 18.” (presumably 1960), as his handwritten notation indicates:

 

My savages both, so kind, so kind,

Blessed me deaf or blessed me blind.

Why did I hunt them not once more,

To feather my roof, to fang my door.

The poem as a whole continues in largely unremarkable fashion, so its having never appeared in journal or book form is perhaps a measure of Wright’s own estimation of the poem’s worth. However, his note to himself makes a finer point, as he frets about the poem’s generalized way of saying nothing but doing so with superficial mechanical grace: “Do it again, but get rid of the rhymes and the purely ‘technical’ ‘required’ padding. Off with their heads!” Wright’s openness before the merits and demerits of his own poem, gifted to readers via his handwritten dialogue with himself, provides specific context to the era’s larger aesthetic wrangling.

That aesthetic wrangling is fleshed out in Wright’s “The Barn in Winter” in an entirely different body. This time it is not a matter of cold metrical precision but of its near-poetic opposite—slack syntax and flat word choice. And if the earlier draft can be disparaged as amounting to mere verbal hubbub lacking any emotional investment, the March 6, 1962, draft following carries the polar burden of sensitive attachment to a precious locale and the people who inhabit it:

 

Robert Bly’s barn is heavy with a million loose grains of corn.

He and Carol gathered them slowly, all day long last autumn,

Out of the smoky fields, that I love

Although they are not my home.

A hard critical eye, either the poet’s or that of a trusted editor, would surely regard these lines as emotively honest but flaccid. Only the speaker’s implicit sense of homelessness, whether real or imagined, charges the poem so it rises a bit above the aesthetic lat line. But for Wright, who had tossed aside well-wrought lines for fear of their vapid technical proficiency, these lines brought an uncommon satisfaction. Listen to the exposed remarks of a poet who was hardly ever pleased with a line he penned during those years of redefinition: “I like the above. . . . I love that barn full of corn—it is rich with Robert & Carol, with red-tailed squirrels, and with welcome. . . . I think the above typescript pleases me as I have been pleased by only 2 or 3 poems I have ever attempted to have done. It is thrilling to name beloved names in a poem.”

Wright must have come to see that these lines loomed large with emotion but little else, as they remain unpublished. Even though these lines failed to make the poetic cut, in them Wright came to something keenly important to him as poet and human being—the electric rush he felt speaking loved ones’ names in his poems. Over the remainder of his career, Wright spiced his poems with names of poets, friends, and places that he loved, so this key gesture of “The Barn in Winter,” if not its actual lines, came to live on.

On a March 6, 1962, draft of the poem “A Small Elegy at Night in the Country,” Wright puts the matter plainly: “To keep the issue clear: I would reduce the typescript above to a single line, if such would let the poem emerge. . . . I am not afraid to abandon rhetoric, but I still can’t judge which is rhetoric & which is true imagination!” Later, Wright references another poet’s hand in his redefinition of poetic self, pondering if he should show the draft to Bly. But Wright cautions himself that he can’t “go on depending” on others, even fellow poets and dear friends, to make the decision for him. Every writer, he understands, stands alone before the page.

The aesthetic problem Wright makes clear is not so much a matter of syntax as a matter of rhetoric behind that syntax. Saying something mellifluously is not the same as saying what one means—or as saying too much in the process. Wright’s politically charged “Eisenhower’s Visit to Franco, 1959” shows the pitfalls awaiting poets trying to learn to speak via poetic image and not through traditional rhetoric. That poet must risk the passivity of pictorial display and wager that the poem’s images muscle enough weight to transport the reader to fresh awareness. If he fails, the poem becomes merely drab landscape, atmospheric at best. But if the poet’s artistic nerve falters and he succumbs to outright statement, the poem pounds its political shoe upon the podium as the Soviet leader Khrushchev did to such poor result when visiting the UN. Few readers enjoy being subjected to a lecture, well-intentioned or not.

Wright’s poem opens with the American president “having flown through the very light of heaven” only to find Franco awaiting him “in a shining circle of police.” The dictator promises Ike “state police” will hunt down “all dark things” while the Spanish poet Antonio Machado, one of Wright’s favorites, instead “follows the moon / Down a road of white dust.” In image only, Wright has set the political stakes: while a beloved poet follows the redemptive moon, Eisenhower shakes hands with the fascist Franco, complicit in the dictator’s bloody suppression of democracy. It’s not Picasso’s Guernica, but its message is similarly political. Here, the poem’s closing images rebuke Eisenhower’s unholy alliance:

 

Smiles glitter in Madrid.

Eisenhower has touched hands with Franco, embracing

In a glare of photographers.

Clean new bombers from America muffle their engines

And glide down now,

Their wings shine in the searchlights

Of bare fields

In Spain.

Wright understood the risks inherent in political poetry, the boring rants they often scream in the voice of the oppressor they seek to silence. In fact, on a September 1961 draft of the poem, Wright expressed his determination to avoid just that sort of shoe-thumping: “I must be careful not to yield too easily to talk and statement.” Still, for Wright the temptation to get in one last brickbat of rhetoric proved too tempting to refuse. One of the poem’s many worksheets concludes by the poet’s confessing what any good reader ought to have already decoded from the poem’s images:

 

I am ashamed of my country.

Readers not drunk on politics’ thinned gin wince at that line. The line’s at once bland and outlandish. Nothing about its syntax raises the poem’s ante, yet it spills the poet’s cards face-up on the table. If anything, readers ought to take heart at Wright’s overplaying his hand, cheered to learn they’re not the only ones to have babbled when they should’ve been quiet. All in all, Wright’s line-by-line reworking shows the perils of a poet’s yielding not to his second but to his twenty-second thought. It also confirms the rightness of Paul Valéry’s admission: “A poem is never finished, only abandoned.” Ah, but to abandon the poem at the moment’s equipoise of gain and loss— there’s the rub.

Lightning Illumination

A poet’s worksheets can lend insight into work that resists readers’ best candlelit incursions. Some work by a poet is so fresh or simply so shockingly innovative that readers struggle to make sense of it in the old-fashioned thematic way, let alone understand its strange application of theoretical advancements. Readers admire writers who take risks of theory and application, but they also hanker to appreciate what’s going on here and why. Wright’s Deep Image poem “Miners” exemplifies the terms of this conundrum. Written in elusive and allusive imagistic sections, the poem’s spider threads of association remain unseen to the inattentive reader’s eye. Faced with its Deep Image mode, many readers conceivably throw up their hands and surrender.

 

1

The police are probing tonight for the bodies

Of children in the black waters

Of the suburbs.

2

Below the chemical riffles of the Ohio River,

Grappling hooks

Drag delicately about, between skiff hulks and sand shoals,

Until they grasp

Fingers.

3

Somewhere in a vein of Bridgeport, Ohio;

Deep in the coal hill behind Hanna’s name;

Below the tipples, and dark as a drowsy woodchuck;

A man, alone,

Stumbles upon the outside locks of a grave, whispering

Oh let me in.

4

Many American women mount long stairs

In the shafts of houses,

Fall asleep, and emerge suddenly into tottering palaces.¹¹

The poem’s redefinition of the term “miners” and its social commentary initiate in the first section’s assault on suburban values. Both the suburban kids and the polluted Ohio River might be said somehow to be victims of our culture and its capitalistic greed. But how they might be “miners” in the sense of those introduced in section 3 and what associations they have with American women awakening in “tottering palaces” probably elude the untrained reader. Likely, these notions sidestep many trained readers as well. Wright no doubt understood the risks. Once, perhaps a bit perturbed during an interview, Wright claimed the poem is in point of fact “extremely formal” in its use of “parallel” images.¹² That clue may help identify the poem’s deployment of Deep Image poetics, but it hardly fingers the thread that links them.

Here’s where literary manuscripts can prove to be invaluable. For readers, a poet’s manuscript commentary can illuminate the poem in a lightning flash. In his characteristically pinched penmanship, Wright notes on a “Miners” worksheet these few words: “Two kinds of miners here: 1. real miners, a social class, a depressed social class, 2. spiritual miners.” Given this gloss, even the most New Critical reader dismissing authorial intention will risk intuiting what links a depressed social class of miners with the socially well-off but spiritually impoverished suburban American mothers. Each seeks release from strictures both societal and economic. On another undated draft of the poem, Wright adds biographical commentary that further enriches the poem’s context, noting this above the poem: “John Skunk, the ‘professional diver,’ in Martins Ferry when we were children. His name was always in the newspapers when somebody drowned & they had to ‘drag’ for the body.” Given these manuscript clues, readers now bring to their experiences with the poem a name to match the action it alludes to, a historical footnote that situates the poem’s abstractions within the Ohio River’s muddy waters.

These comments also offer broader context for Wright’s poetry of social engagement. The poem depicts other citizens’ struggles, not those of the speaker. Its socially relevant epiphany arrives within readers via their engagement with the poem’s images, not through the speaker’s self-aggrandizing pronouncement of expanded awareness, for the speaker makes no such declaration. In fact, the poem contains not a single “I” pronoun; its focus is not the poet’s experience but that of his fellow Americans. Despite the needling of those who reprove Wright for his poems of self-epiphany—and indeed he wrote his share of those—Wright’s scribbled manuscript notes on “Eisenhower’s Visit to Franco” and “Miners” underscore the poet’s larger communal concerns with politics and working-class life.

Diaristic Unmasking

One final element often present within writers’ assembled manuscripts is their potential for exposing artists’ personal and aesthetic struggles. In this way manuscript materials amount to a diary containing admissions of doubt or personal taste writers mostly keep to themselves. We readers relish the voyeurism of looking over the writer’s shoulder as he or she spills out some untamed remark not meant for public consumption. We feel momentarily in on something, privy to a secret. The effect is to humanize an aesthetic issue that may seem otherwise merely abstract or ethereal—in effect, humanizing the poet as well. As Juri Lotman reminds us, the diary’s purpose is for the “auto-organization of the individual,” a way, essentially, for the diary writer to plot his or her journey through life. Wright’s worksheets proffer a particularly apt example of such diaristic tendencies; throughout these materials Wright proved to be unguarded and vulnerable. In Wright’s remarks regarding his own work and the frustrating process of poetic creation, readers encounter a brutally honest artist. Take, for instance, this assessment Wright scrawls across an undated draft of the poem “Twilight”: “This is junk—a perfect specimen of ‘contemporary’ phoniness in America.” What poet has not at one time thought something similar of her own work, but who has the temerity to write it down—even if it’s meant only for her own eyes?

Wright’s comments on his worksheets often pull back the curtain so readers might gaze upon the puny man working the Great Wizard of Oz’s levers, bells, and whistles. The poet whose many flamboyant poetic gestures seem to readers to exude self-assured swagger is instead unmasked as someone lost, searching, and wounded. In this way the poet serves as his own Toto, reducing the Wizard to mere artist in quandary. Since one is unlikely to share one’s diary with another, these remarks would at first seem meant only for the poet’s benefit. But then there’s the matter of the poet’s saving these worksheets as aesthetic documents sure to find their way into the hands of some critic, poet, or literary executor. Perhaps the need to speak to himself, maybe the part of himself not bound up in the quest of making a poem, is what fuels these confessions. If Wright the poet is thus bifurcated into artist-at-work and human-in-the-world, this dialogic conversation may well benefit both in their separate realms. The artist needs his twin’s feet on the ground; the simple human being wishes for his other’s feet in the air. Here’s Wright on a March 6, 1962, draft of “A Small Elegy at Night in the Country,” deliberating over the deletion of four lines from the poem: “Damn! That question! If I could truly answer it—I could become a poet. I would like very much to be a poet. I really would. . . . If the answer is yes [to cut the lines], then I am learning. If no, then I have to submerge again. But I should record the fact that I am happy to see and feel the problem!” Liberally spritzed with exclamation points, these comments come off as both emphatic and playful. Wright, of course, knows he’s a poet. But he also realizes he’s not yet the poet he wants to be. Still, he relishes the simple act of recording his progress along the way to his version of the “new” poetry. Keep in mind, dear reader, all of Wright’s artistic angst, all this furor and hubbub, swirls around a poem that would never see its way into print. Any accountant would surely call for a cost/reward analysis of this and similar artistic expenditures. Luckily, the poet’s bottom line resists quantification.

That Wright was rife with doubt about his aesthetic choices and his future as a poet seems clear to us now, given our access to these manuscripts. Back then, while Bly praised Wright’s aesthetic renovation, Louis D. Rubin huffed that Wright’s work “had gone way off on a tangent,” chiding him for rejecting rational thinking in favor of imagistic mysticism.¹³ It seemed to others Wright was under the influence of a powerful intoxicant—Robert Bly’s literary guru-ism or some other bottomless aesthetic bottle. Still others wished ardently to believe Wright’s artistic behavior radiated confidence and assurance. Tellingly, for them to judge so was also to trust in the general principle of aesthetic sea change and in the particular possibility of its magic occurring in their own work. If Wright were to achieve his conversion experience, might not they hope for the same? Little did readers know then that Wright doubted his every aesthetic move, beginning with the decision to suppress Amenities. On the same May 21, 1962, draft of “Holding a Pearl,” Wright further opens his literary trench coat: “I was afraid last summer that the withdrawal of the previous version of the book from Wesleyan might be just another neurotic, self-destructive move on my part. Well, the dread I felt was real—but I am so glad, so relieved . . . because the book that is still emerging from the deliberate wreckage of the old one is what I most deeply wanted to write in the first place.” Faced with such exposed musings, might one ever again consider artistic certainty without invoking its twin—aesthetic doubt?

Our appreciation of Wright’s achievement is augmented by our knowledge of his personal and aesthetic struggles. We know this mostly (and best) through the mining of Wright’s literary manuscripts. Wright, it turns out, saved nearly everything, even his naked musings. These manuscript materials plot an aesthetic terrain where one powerful tectonic force slams against another, shaping Wright’s work in explosive and lasting ways. Heaved this way by emotion, yanked that way by artistic invention, discovery, and surprise, Wright left readers a predigital GPS map of his turns, backups, and swerves, a route for a trip embarked upon only once. Here’s it’s useful to be reminded of David Baker’s summary of critics’ responses to Wright’s journey of redefinition. Baker suggests Wright is viewed now as either “one of our age’s great lyric poets” or a “sentimentalist and egoist.”¹⁴ Wright’s awareness of what is at stake for him, as well as for any artist open to possibility, infuses his literary papers with elemental power—the bristling, electric energy of aesthetic risk. Wright’s drafts and diaristic commentary make clear he understood the consequences of the redefinition he had undertaken, consequences that reverberate within his work and its critical reception to this day.